The Ambition Interviews: A Table of Contents

Today The Atlantic is presenting a short series of essays we’re calling The Ambition Interviews.

The Ambition Interviews began as a project between two friends, Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace, who had attended Northwestern University in the early ’90s. What had happened, they wondered, to all of their brilliant, hard-working friends from their college days? Had life come together as they had hoped? They reached out to 37 other members of their sorority’s graduating class, and those conversations became the foundation of the essays we now present.

We recommend starting with Hana’s introduction essay, which details the project, and from there the essays—listed here—can be read in any order.

Beyond Maternity Leave
For all the focus on parental leave as a barrier to women’s professional ascent, women’s real struggle with work-parenting balance grew—alongside their children—years after their maternity leave ended.

The women of this study are not by any means a representative sample of America, and, in particular, Hana writes that the group was not racially diverse. What makes this group interesting is not that it tells the story of women in America, but that it tells the story of a group of women who by all measures were in a position to rise to the highest echelons of any industry. Why some did—and why many didn’t—reveals much about what stands in the way of greater gender equality in the workplace today.

We’d love to hear from you and your own experiences in pursuing both career and family and the tradeoffs they each demand. Email us at hello@theatlantic.com.

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Rebecca J. Rosen is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees the Family and Education sections.